At the risk of sounding snarky;

  Last Saturday afternoon one of his client’s domains vanished from his GoDaddy account.

  Lee is one of the most competent IT guys I know. 

People get tied to their registrar by using their DNS or other services. It's a mistake, but it's extremely common.

So if you have someone using GoDaddy, and everything is working, how do you sell them on the idea of migrating DNS or hosting or email if they've never had an issue?

It does sound snarky, maybe GoDaddy was the cheaper option at one point and they stuck with it. I get that.

I use some square space for a lot of stuff, but it's largely because Google Domains sold out and the price is "fine." Sure, I could use something else, but this works, the cost is correct, and - I can't stress this enough - it already freaking works. I also use a python as a service tool I point at frequently. Their customer service is great, so I doubt this would ever happen there? But yeah, I'm not manually configuring a server somewhere most of the time.

Is it the "best" possible tool for the job? Not really, but it works well enough for the stuff I use and my workflows are already rock solid to deploy code to prod, etc. Is it because it's impossible for me to spin up a VPS or I'm too stupid to figure out Hetzner? Probably. But no, I've done it before, I could do it again, but that would take me X hours that I'm not getting paid for to migrate for limited utility, possible customer interruptions, and stress. I might need to migrate in a year or so, but until then, I'm not going to bother.

I reckon that's a similar sort of thing that happened here and depending on what they're doing business-wise, Lee could be insanely competent IT person and was just unlucky because the hammer he reached out for with GoDaddy actually turned out to be a foot gun that took years to fire.

It happens, it's not ideal, but it happens - I'm just glad they got it figured out and I'm glad that these sorts of events percolate up in the hn zeitgeist, because I definitely know who I won't be turning to in the future. Like, I kind of already knew GoDaddy was trash? I used them something like 10 years ago to spool up a website for a friend of mine. The whole experience was garbage then and I said, "never again" - but also that was kind of at the beginning of me even learning about how this stuff works? But I could totally see a scenario where I get snared into a product ecosystem and the opportunity cost of switching out of it outweighs staying put until it blows up in my face.

Read every alternative volunteered here. Imagine any world where in the next 5 years they can't be enshittified, sold to a predatory private equity, their support lines AI-ified, their headcount reduced by 40% without your knowledge, etc etc. 27 years is a very long time.

A competent IT person can have a backup plan for every expected failure. They can't control registrar level screw ups.

Companies explicitly selling you "bulletproof domains" like MarkMonitor have screwed up big time.

Also as an IT guy, asking to register a new domain with X is much easier than asking to transfer a long held domain away from Y.

Where would you host domains?

Why not?

GoDaddy is a valid domain registrar. The customer had dual MFA set up. The customer did all the right things.

I’ve never heard of Godaddy making this kind of egregious mistake before. I’ve heard of some doozies, sure, but nothing like this.

Don’t blame the victim. “It’s their fault they got robbed, they left their door unlocked” is not a valid response to a situation like that or like this. The robber still stole, and godaddy still broke their own rules, rules that customers pay to have enforced.

When you find yourself victim-blaming, you will find yourself on the wrong side.